Women’s emergency shelters in Montreal ‘deluged’ with growing demands

There are calls for the Lego government to fast track construction of women shelters. It comes as data shows more and more victims of intimate partner violence are being turned away. There’s just not enough room. Melpa Comateros is the executive director of the Shield of a Athena. So Melpa, according to a Statistics Canada study, 705 women a day are being turned away. What has your organization been seeing when it comes to emergency shelters? We’re deluged. We’re literally deluged. And we’ve been deluged for a while now. I think it took the pandemic for the government to realize that there was not enough space. So in our case, we we doubled the capacity of our shelter. Not to say that we hadn’t doubled it before. It’s just that, you know, they asked us formally to double it. They acknowledged the need and from 9 places we went all of a sudden to 17 so and last week for the past couple of weeks and my coordinator Maria was telling me we were at 21. So that’s the situation at 21 when you have 17. So you’re having to turn people away then no, we take them and even if they have to sit on the couch and tell somebody, you know, it’s like a a work in progress. You know, you try to schedule people so that as one is scheduled to leave, the other woman with her two kids are scheduled to come. So it’s sort of balances it. But as of the past two weeks, we’ve had 21, so it’s been very, very busy. What about because you also work with women who come from diverse communities? What about women and families whose language of preference is neither French nor English? What about that? Well, you know, this is an issue. I mean, violence against women is an issue worldwide for for all women. But when certain women are presented with language barriers, they have no family support or community support, then the situation for them is really doubly hard. And 80% of our of our clients either at the external or at the shelter, they’re referred to us by the existing health and social services of Quebec. And the primary reason is that we have the languages we speak in 17 languages, OK. So the Ontario government, I wanted your take on this supporting an an opposition bill to declare intimate partner violence and epidemic. What do you make of that? What would that mean? Oh, but that it’s been an epidemic for years now. I mean, the World Health Organization has has labeled it as an epidemic, I think from as early as 2017, 2018, way before the pandemic. And you know, it’s at crisis proportions. And when we, we look at other countries, when we look at Europe, when we look at, you know, at other countries all over the world, it’s the same situation there. It’s one out of every three women globally are victims of violence and we have to do something about it. So what would more? I mean, we have maybe less than a minute. What more would you want to see from the province ’cause they, I think last November they announced some integrated strategy with police, social workers, you know, a long term strategy. What more would you want to see from the province? We want to see them connect the dots. We want to see legislation, better legislation, more prevention, better housing and more more of it because we have a crisis in the emergency shelters. But there’s also a crisis when we have to refer the women after, we can only keep them for two or three months. But what happens is we keep them for up to five or six because there’s such a crisis in the second step, housing. So better housing, you know, perhaps more financial assistance to women, you know, categorizing them in a status where they need financial support. I mean, these are women in the most vulnerable situation. And what is anybody, what has anybody ever done regarding that? No, but nothing. Nothing has been done. And most of the women that we see, unfortunately, are between the ages of 22 to 44. So violence against women, unfortunately, is not going anywhere. It affects all communities. And there are ripple effects to this unchecked violence. We have to deal with it. So I’m telling the government they have to deal with it. OK. Thank you so much. Thank you.